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Introduction

London’s population was about 1.7 million when the young Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837. It continued to grow rapidly throughout her reign. The advent of the mainline railways in the 1840s and 1850s brought even more people into the Capital. Traffic congestion was reaching crisis point and radical solutions were needed. 

Congestion

In 1846, a Royal Commission ruled that new railways should be barred from the City and West End areas. As traffic grew, crossing London became a nightmare. It could take an hour and a half to travel five miles from Paddington to Bank by horse-drawn omnibus. Numerous outlandish schemes were proposed to resolve these problems but failed to find support.  

The Metropolitan Railway

Charles Pearson, Solicitor to the City of London, was a vocal advocate for a solution to London’s problems. He saw both social and economic advantages in building a railway that would link the mainline termini together and clear the slums of the Fleet Valley at the same time. His idea was to relocate slum dwellers to new suburbs built to house them, and to provide cheap rail travel for them to get to work.  

Pearson’s plans were rejected by Parliament but coincided with proposals from another group of entrepreneurs that had Parliamentary approval. The two concerns merged and established the Metropolitan Railway Company in August 1854. 

The company constructed an underground railway, which ran for three miles under the New Road, from the Great Western Railway (GWR) terminus at Paddington to the edge of the City at Farringdon Street, via the Great Northern Railway (GNR) terminus at King’s Cross. They had difficulty in raising the capital for such a radical and expensive scheme. Objectors worried that the tunnels would collapse under the weight of traffic overhead, undermining the foundations of nearby buildings, and passengers would choke due to the sulphurous emissions from the locomotives. Eventually the £1m capital was raised over five years.  

The chosen route ran beneath existing main roads to minimize the expense and inconvenience of demolishing buildings. The line was built just below street level using a technique known as ‘cut and cover’. A trench about ten metres wide and six metres deep was dug. Brick walls were then constructed, and the cutting roofed over with a brick arch. A two-metre deep layer of topsoil was laid on top and the road above was rebuilt. Where there was insufficient depth for a brick arch, iron girders were used to support the road. 

Services started in January 1863. The original plan was to pull the trains with steam locomotives, using firebricks in the boilers to provide steam, but these engines were not powerful enough and were never introduced. Instead, traditional locomotives were fitted with water tanks in which the steam could be condensed. The smoke and fumes remained a problem, despite the provision of open sections between some stations for ventilation, but such discomfort did not dissuade the public from using this new method of travel. The ‘Met’ was a commercial success.  

Underground rivalry

In 1864, Parliament was presented with 250 different underground schemes. A new committee recommended a second railway to join up with the Metropolitan to form an ‘inner circle’ linking the capital’s mainline railway termini. The Metropolitan District Railway Company, headed by the Met’s chief engineer John Fowler, was chosen to complete the task. The first section of the District Railway opened in 1868, but the two companies fell out before the Inner Circle could be completed. Rivalry and legal action continued between the two companies throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The Circle was completed following Government pressure in 1884. 

Part of the problem was the personal animosity between the two company directors, James Staats Forbes and Sir Edward Watkin, and their differing styles and visions. Watkin saw the Metropolitan as a mainline railway and dreamt of a link to France through a Channel tunnel. His line was gradually extended to Harrow and beyond. Forbes favoured shorter extensions largely constructed in partnership with other companies such as the London and South Western Railway. 

Deeper and cheaper

The new underground lines had formed a circuit around central London and extended out into the suburbs by the 1880s. But they did not cross the city, so congestion continued to be a problem. The ‘cut and cover’ construction method was now considered too expensive and disruptive – the only alternative was to build lines deeper underground in order to travel beneath the centre of the Capital. 

B/W glass neg, Thames Tunnel work in progress, from The Mirror, 1837
B/W glass neg, engraving of the Thames Tunnel work in progress, from The Mirror, 1837

The world’s first tunnel under a river, built by engineer Marc Isambard Brunel, opened between Wapping and Rotherhithe in 1843. The key to Brunel’s project was a device called a shield, which supported the soft ground during excavation, protecting the miners. Brunel proved that tunnelling beneath London was possible, but a better method was required. Originally intended for road traffic, the Thames Tunnel cost a fortune, took nearly 20 years to build and eventually opened for pedestrians only.  

In the 1860s another engineer, Peter Barlow, conceived the idea of a second subway under the river, using Brunel’s principle but with a circular shield. He contracted a former pupil of his, James Greathead, to build the shield needed to carry out the work. Greathead’s first shield was just 2.1 metres in diameter and closed at one end. In the centre of the closed end was a watertight door, from which two miners could remove the soil by hand. Once the space in front was clear, the entire shield could be forced forward into the space by means of huge screw jacks. The newly dug section of tunnel was then lined with cast-iron segments to form a cylinder, or ‘tube’.  

engraving by unknown artist, use of the Barlow-Greathead shield to construct the Tower Subway, 1869
Engraving by unknown artist, use of the Barlow-Greathead shield to construct the Tower Subway, 1869

Although the construction of the resulting Tower Subway was successful, and completed in only ten months, the railway running through the tunnel was a commercial failure. The cable traction system used was unreliable and the railway closed in November 1870, but the tunnel is still in use carrying telecommunications cables.  

 Tunnel Construction on the City and South London Railway (C&SLR), 1889-1900
Tunnel Construction on the City and South London Railway (C&SLR), 1889-19

The next crucial technological development, in the 1880s, was a clean, efficient and reliable source of power: electricity. Electric motors made the world’s first deep-level electric railway, the City & South London Railway (C&SLR), possible. James Greathead enlarged and improved his tunnelling shield, by adding hydraulic rams to push it forward, but used the same principles.  

The C&SLR opened in November 1890, with a pair of 3 metre diameter tunnels running between King William Street in the City and suburban Stockwell. Hydraulic lifts were installed at the stations to transfer passengers between street and platform. Trains were made up of three carriages and hauled by electric locomotives. The carriages were narrow and furnished with tiny windows just below the roof, because it was thought that passengers would not need to see out. Guards at the end of each carriage called out the names of stations and opened and closed the gates for passengers.  

The railway was extremely busy during the rush hours, prompting Punch magazine to christen it the ‘sardine box railway’. The window-less carriages became known as ‘padded cells’. Like many pioneering ventures, it was not without its problems, mainly caused by its cramped tunnels, under-powered locomotives and a power supply that had difficulty in coping with the volume of traffic. 

Although the C&SLR was a success, it did not make the profits expected of it. Many more proposals to build ‘tube’ railways followed but raising money from cautious investors was a perennial problem. The short two-station Waterloo & City Railway was opened in 1898, with backing from the London & North Western Railway, but the next ‘Tube’, the Central London Railway (CLR), took more than ten years from its planning to opening in 1900. Both railways used Greathead’s shield.  

The CLR was successful, partly because it was used for shopping and leisure as well as commuting. Other tube schemes approved by Parliament in the 1890s were not so lucky. Several languished without investors, and one even ran out money in the middle of tunnelling. 

The population of London grew from 1 million in 1800 to 6 million in 1900. The crowds flocking to Queen Victoria’s funeral in February 1901 would see the largest city in the world transformed before the decade was out. The intervention of a powerful American financier would bring London’s failing tube schemes back to life and electrify the Metropolitan and District Railways, as the basis of the modern Underground system. His company would grow to be a direct predecessor of today’s Transport for London (TfL). 

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